How bad are the
feel-good foodsNeeta Lal
Comfort food seekers must learn to distinguish between physical hunger
and emotional craving, say dieticiansThe
food-mood connect has existed ever since human beings began chomping
on raw berries to stave off hunger. But it’s only now that modern
physicians, neurologists and psychologists are focusing on how certain
types of foods—classified as ‘comfort foods’—directly and
strongly impact our minds and body.

Making wildlife historyPrashant K. NandaMovies
by two Indian filmmakers
will feature in a unique British library that will trace the history of
environment and wildlife filmmaking in the last 100 years. Naresh Bedi
and Mike Pandey, both recipients of the Wildscreen Panda Award, better
known as the Green Oscar, will feature in the library, WildFilmHistory,
which is coming up in Bristol.

He set
new directionsJangveer Singh in Bangalore
A man of great talent, Pattabhi Rama Reddy will be remembered most as
the harbinger of the new wave in Kannada cinema

She
wrote her own futureRashmi Talwar
Anwant Kaur has more than 20 books to her name and was editor of a
Punjabi magazine way back in 1968

The
food-mood connect has existed ever since human beings began chomping
on raw berries to stave off hunger. But it’s only now that modern
physicians, neurologists and psychologists are focusing on how certain
types of foods—classified as ‘comfort foods’—directly and
strongly impact our minds and body. Ergo, some foods send strong
messages through neurotransmitters or ’chemical messengers’ to our
brain, influencing our emotions and moods. "Calorie-dense foods—like
chocolates, sweetmeats, deep-fried items, junk food and ice-cream—have
pleasurable associations, which lead us to crave for them,"
explains physician Dr Ravinder K Tuli, head of the Department of
Holistic Healing at Delhi’s Apollo Indraprastha Hospital.

"Similarly, certain
nutrients like fats and complex carbohydrates have physiological
properties which act as mood elevators. These nutrients release
endorphins, the feel-good hormones, in the body, thus heightening our
sense of well-being." But what exactly are these ‘feel-good’
foods?

"Comfort foods are
those foods which address a person’s emotional need more than a
physical one," explains psychologist Dr Jitendra Nagpal, Senior
Consultant, Vidyasagar Institute of Mental and Health and Neurological
Studies (VIMHANS), New Delhi. "Physical satiation is usually not
the agenda here. Since reaching out for comfort foods signals an
emotion-linked hunger, the reasons could vary from depression, stress
at work and broken relationships to diet plans gone awry,
anything."

Hence dieticians advice
that comfort food seekers should learn to distinguish between physical
hunger - which builds up gradually and tells the brain clearly when to
stop - and emotional eating, which is sporadic, sudden and often
prolonged.

Also, emotional eating
is irrational, says Ishi Khosla, a Delhi-based clinical nutritionist.
"You just don’t want it to end; you want to keep gorging on
whatever is available, regardless of the food’s nutritive value. On
the contrary, real and physical hunger sends an unambiguous signal to
the brain to stop when our tummies are full." Also, adds Khosla,
emotional hunger riddles us with guilt while normal hunger seems
"well-earned and, therefore, leads to no negative feelings".

Another way to
distinguish real hunger from emotional hunger, according to some
dieticians, is that the latter invariably strikes when we’re
depressed, bored or lonely. "And this is a really vicious circle
because depression propels us to eat more, which in turn makes us put
on weight," says Khosla. "And added weight makes no one
happy. So make sure that you’re not establishing a hard-to-break
pattern for yourself." Good advice, given that women, especially,
are socialised to co-relating their self-image with current beauty
norms.

According to Nagpal,
pre-menopausal women need to be especially careful while reaching out
for comfort foods because, at this age, their hormones are wreaking
havoc with their systems in any case. This makes many women overly
emotional which, when combined with other factors like depression and
lifestyle stress, could lead to frequent binge eating for comfort. But
is the craving for comfort foods gender or age-specific? Are women
truly more susceptible? While the jury is still out on this one, what’s
definitely established is that gender and age do affect one’s taste
in comfort foods. According to a survey done by the University of
Illinois Food and Brand Lab in the US in 2000, men and older people
"...prefer comfort foods that are warm, hearty and meal-related,
such as steaks, soups and casseroles, while women and kids reach out
for snacks or finger foods, such as chips, savouries, ice-cream and
chocolate". So is consuming comfort food all bad then? "Not
at all," says Dr Swati Chaddha, consultant dietician, Max
Healthcare, New Delhi. "In fact, satisfying an occasional craving
for comfort food is a great stress-buster because it leads to physical
and mental satiety, which in turn triggers off the feel-good factor.
Occasional bingeing helps us detangle our emotions and focus more
productively on the task at hand. But the trick is to not give in to
such binges too frequently."

Apart from analysing one’s
food intake, one also needs to probe one’s emotional needs. Why is
it that we are seeking comfort in food? This brainstorming, say
psychologists, really works because, over a period of time, the mind
learns to divert itself effectively. In fact, as soon as emotional
hunger strikes, specialists advise that we should try and funnel our
energy into diversionary activities like gardening, going out for a
walk, meeting up with friends, writing that long overdue letter,
reading a good book or playing with pets.

"Also,"
advises Nagpal, "keep your communication lines open. Half the
problems in our society exist because we have stopped communicating
with each other. Don’t bottle up emotions. Meaningful communication
with our near and dear ones is the best antidote to stress." —
WFS

Movies
by two Indian filmmakers
will feature in a unique British library that will trace the history
of environment and wildlife filmmaking in the last 100 years. Naresh
Bedi and Mike Pandey, both recipients of the Wildscreen Panda Award,
better known as the Green Oscar, will feature in the library,
WildFilmHistory, which is coming up in Bristol.

"It is always a
great honour to be part of an international community and get
recognition for your hard work," said Bedi.

Wildscreen, the
organiser of one of the most respected environment film festivals, is
constructing the library.

"I hope the effort
will prove beneficial for wildlife filmmakers, environmentalists and
nature lovers," remarked 60-year-old Bedi.
Bedi won the Green Oscar in the best cameraman category in 1984 for
the film The Ganges Ghadial, which captures the life cycle of
an endangered species of crocodile.

Mike Pandey: Part of the big circuit

In the initial phase,
WildFilmHistory will be a library of key wildlife films from the last
100 years.

Said Hamish MacCall,
communication and marketing manager of Wildscreen, on email: "A
part of the project involves interviewing prominent filmmakers. Among
them are Naresh Bedi and Mike Pandey."

MacCall said it was
Wildscreen’s "dream to create a wildlife-film museum" when
more funds were secured. The library is to be launched in 2007.

He said in its first
phase the library would include around 200 films, 100 articles and
about 30 oral histories.

Wildlife filmmaking is
considered to have begun in the 1880s. Oliver Gregory Pike’s film
about birds in 1907, which was screened for a theatre audience in
London, is widely believed to be the first wildlife film in Britain.

Pandey won the Green
Oscar thrice for The Last Migration - Wild Elephant Capture at
Sarguja in 1994, Shores of Silence: Whale Sharks in India
in 2000 and Vanishing Giants - a film on the death of elephants
in captivity - in 2004. He was thrilled with Wildscreen’s new
project.

"It is a great move
and I am sure that the project will prove to be a one-point shop for
hundreds of environmentalists and filmmakers. It is a pleasure to be a
part of the big league and more so to be part of Wildscreen’s
initiative." — IANS

A man of great talent, Pattabhi Rama Reddy will be remembered most as the harbinger of the new wave in
Kannada cinema

A
poet, a mathematician, a filmmaker and a political activist, Pattabhi Rama
Reddy was all these and more. Born into an aristocratic family in Nellore,
Andhra Pradesh, on January 19, 1919, Reddy’s life is a story of revolution
and reform, which had a profound impact on our times. This multi-diamensional
personality passed away in Bangalore on May 6.

Deeply influenced by
Rabindranath Tagore as a young man, Reddy rejected his ancestral wealth to
study at Santiniketan. After a two-year stint there, Reddy joined Calcutta
University to do Master’s in English literature. Living in a small room on
the Lower Chitpur road, the young student was shocked by the human misery
around him. The World War II in 1938 forced him to face the harsh reality
around him and have a re-look at Tagore’s philosophy. Finding it difficult
to concentrate on his studies any longer, he returned to Madras.

In Madras, Reddy came into
contact with revolutionary poets like Sri Sri and Mallavarapu Viswerwara
Rao. This resulted in works, including Fidelu Ragala Dozen (A Dozen
Melodies), which revolutionised Telugu poetry. Noted Kannada writer and
Jnanpith awardee U. R. Ananthamurthy says Pattabhi revolutionised Telugu
poetry long before any South Indian language became modern. He says Pattabhi
wrote remarkable irreverent poems, shocking people who were used to
sentimental poetry of the time. The poems live on even today with Ragala
Dozen now running in its tenth edition.

Soon Reddy was off to another
adventure. He completed his Master’s degree, this time choosing Columbia
University to enrol in a course in English literature and mathematics. When
he was in his second year, his name came up in the draft list. The young man
refused to be drafted on principle, saying that his parents had been
persecuted by the British and he would not fight on their side as part of
the Allied Forces. Given one month to leave the US, Reddy went to South
America, walked through the Andes and dodged U–boats in a merchant vessel
to land in Bombay after two and a half months.

Back in Madras, he became an
active member of the Madras Players theatre group. He founded Jayanthi
Pictures and produced the Telugu film Pellinaati Pramanalu, which
bagged the National award. It was during this time that he also made a film Samskara,
based on the novel by U. R. Ananthamurthy. The film, which was a startling
indictment of caste and priesthood, won him the President’s Gold Medal for
the Best Feature Film in the same year that Satyajit Ray’s Pather
Panchali was also in competition.

The film, which went on to win
international awards, including the Bronze Leopard at Locarno, is a landmark
in Indian cinema; it triggered a new wave in Kannada filmmaking and inspired
a promising crop of young filmmakers like Girish Karnad.

Among the other films he
produced are Chanda Marutha (Wild Boats), Sringara Masa (Paper
Boats) and Devaradu in Kannada and Krishna Arjuna Yudham and Bhagichakram
in Telugu, which established a parallel art movement in South India.

Pattabhi’s daughter Nandana
Reddy, who is a trade unionist and social worker, says her father always put
his entire energy into whatever he pursued. Like, when he saw actress
Snehalata dancing and fell in love with her. He vowed he would not shave
until he married her and marry her he did in 1948 against the wishes of both
his and her parents as the bride was a Christian and intercaste marriages
were quite a taboo then.

The couple soon immersed
themselves in politics and were attracted to the socialist ideals of Ram
Manohar Lohia and Jayaprakash Narayan. They had to pay for this with
Snehalata being imprisoned for allegedly concealing the whereabouts of
socialist leader George Fernandes during the Emergency in 1976. Snehalata
remained in jail for eight months and fell ill as she was not given
treatment for her asthama. She died in January 1977, five days after her
release.

The reforming zeal of Reddy
lives even today among the working children. He founded the organisation
Concerned for Working Children (CWC), which at present under the leadership
of his daughter Nandana continues to address the issues of working children
besides fighting for their rights.

Anwant Kaur has more than 20 books to her name and was editor of a Punjabi magazine way back in 1968

As
an 11-year-old she coyly posed
before a ‘box camera’ and declared herself an editor. This happened in
1946 in Mohanpura, a Muslim-dominated mohalla in Rawalpindi,
Pakistan.

It took Anwant Kaur 22 years
to realise her dream. In 1953, she joined Kanwal, a Punjabi monthly
magazine established in 1940 in Amritsar, and in the same year become Editor
of the magazine’s children section. She assumed complete responsibility of
the magazine as its first woman Editor in 1968.

Anwant first tasted the
influence of media during her childhood. Recalling her early years, she
says: "My destiny was written by the pen of my paternal uncle, Dr
Harnam Singh Vohra."

She remembers the days when
the freedom movement had gathered momentum and her uncle, a dental surgeon,
had intensified anti-British propaganda through their Urdu weekly newspaper Punjab
Gazette.

She says: "At the
threshold of freedom, the talks in our house centred on the pivotal role of
the print media. We children would fold newspaper pages after dark under
hooded oil lamps, and tie them in bundles for a pre-dawn delivery, to escape
detection. The freedom struggle was not merely an adventure as situations
and consequences were real and fiery."

She vividly recalls numerous
attacks during Partition that were repulsed by her family till they escaped
to Tarn Taran on the Indian side. Her father Malik Singh, who was in the
army, owned a shop that sold arms and ammunition.

Having witnessed the Partition
trauma, she wrote a touching short story, Keemet merey vishwas di, when
she was in Class IX. The story, which gave the real-life account of a
10-year-old Sikh boy of Thoa Khalsa village in Pakistan who was left behind
while his family escaped to India, was adjudged the best story in her class.
Later in 1953, the school principal had it published in a newspaper, Jathedaar.

Despite belonging to a family
of war veterans, it was the ‘pen’ and not the ‘sword’ that
fascinated Anwant. She got married to Avtar Singh Deepak, principal of a
government senior secondary school, and now manager of the Gursevak printing
press. Anwant too started a weekly newspaper Jal Tarang. In 1963, she
released her first book Rang Birangi Khedaan—a book on the playway
method of learning science, which has been accepted by the State Languages
Department.

She was awarded by the Punjabi
Likhari Sabha, Uttar Pradesh, in 1982 and again in 1983. In same year, the
Punjabi Sahit Sabha honoured her for her monthly magazine Kanwal.
Declared the best storywriter in 1998, she received Principal Sujan Singh
Award by the Sahit Vichar Kendra.

Anwant has stoically faced the
loss of her two daughters— one of whom had a brain tumour and died at age
of 18— and a number of other hardships that life brought her. At one time
her family suffered a major financial crisis, and they had to even sell
their household articles. However, Anwant never lost hope and also worked as
narrator of her stories in All India Radio.

This woman editor sailed
through the Emergency period and the militancy days of Punjab when
journalists were being targeted. Only a cardiac problem in 1986 prevented
her from continuing to work for her beloved magazine.